Innovation and Futuring in Automotive
The Call
An international component supplier to automotive manufacturers needed to fill their product development roadmap. They had traditionally relied on internal brainstorming sessions every 2-3 years to guide short-term solution development, but they challenged themselves to aim through a 10-year horizon to increase R&D lead-time and bring game-changing innovation into an already rapidly changing vertical.
Our Response
Catapult designed a multi-day collaboration session to lead a cross-functional group of client stakeholders through consumer empathy and targeting thought-exercises, and creative problem solving. First, we facilitated a discussion around future trend exploration, delving into shifting consumer need states and implications to the business. This provided a springboard for facilitated ideation through an empathetic lens of future consumer needs. Ideation exercises were crafted by Catapult’s seasoned innovation architects to encompass various forms of creative thought and sensorial stimuli to maximize creative output.
The Celebration
The innovation workshop spurred fresh thought about the future of consumer needs and produced over 200 ideas, each written and illustrated in Catapult’s Idea Abstract format. We ended our session by helping our clients prioritize the ideas, and those with highest priority moved into their Quality Function Deployment process for immediate product design work. The visibility and success of the project has also spurred discussion of repeating the approach for the client’s European division.
From our client…
“Catapult’s approach goes well beyond the internal brainstorming sessions we have traditionally run. The thought-provoking process guided us to think much further into the future and excited our Innovation team to evolve an even wider range of new ideas into reality. And the volume and quality of ideas were incredible.”